H.264/x264 successor?

[fugo99]

Following in the footsteps of what looks like many, many others, I finally took the plunge this Christmas and set up a HTPC with PVR (using the open source Mythbuntu distro for front and back ends). The posts in this forum have been a fantastic resource in choosing the kit and getting the system working well.

However, I hope I'm not alone in struggling to find enough storage space to deal with the demands of HD programming. Even with reasonably priced 1TB hard drives on the market, the size of 1080p video files still seems monstrous . It feels as if the generous storage:file size ratio we all experienced in being able to use H.264 to re-encode the previous industry standard, MPEG-2, came to an end when H.264 was adopted as the de facto video coding standard.

So, given H.264 (and its open source cousin x264) seem to have been around for a few years now, does anyone know of any better/more efficient video compression algorithms available to the public? Or if not, is there some fundamental limitation that would stop us from seeing something new in the near future?

Save Our Storage!

[nwhitfield]

You could investigate Dirac, and see if that gives you any meaningful improvement, but at the moment, I can't think of anything else on the horizon - storage volume isn't an issue for the film studios on BluRay and bandwitdth issues mean 1080p is unlikely in the broadcast world.

High quality, efficient real time encoders for h.264 are still relatively new bits of kit, and still improving quite a lot.

Until broadcasters or film studios feel the pinch, I don't suppose they'll start really pushing hard for the next generation of codec. Remember MPEG2 was in public use for over a decade before any meaningful public deployment of H.264.